From Socially Distant to Socially Engaged: Exploring the Soundscape and Material Environment of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Abstract

Ostensibly a story about gaining confidence in love, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has been explored as a summa of contemporary musical styles and a treatise on the memorial arts. It has also been examined as an important example of the use of citation and allusion in the fourteenth century because it incorporates references to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose. This essay enhances these studies by focusing on a particular aspect of the narrative: the use of soundscape and material environment to express the protagonist’s emotional growth. After exploring key concepts such as soundscape, authorial self-presentation, and melancholy, it considers how sound is introduced and presented in relation to the narrator’s emotional world and how music is woven through the narrative. An analysis of how sound and touch play a role in the narrator’s interaction with Lady Hope leads to a discussion of the use of soundscape and material environment in the description of the Park of Hesdin and the festivities at the manor house. As this examination of soundscape and environment will show, Machaut chooses to use them as a means to convey the narrator’s burgeoning confidence: he gives a minimal and clichéd description of the wonderful park when the narrator is mired in melancholy yet offers an elaborate, exciting treatment of the manor house after the narrator’s confidence-building interaction with Lady Hope. The essay closes with a consideration of how the presentation of sound and material environment relates to Machaut’s use of Boethius. In the context of the material turn within medieval studies, I argue that we can view sound and objects within medieval literature as media for the communication of ideas about narrative and character development and that this form of analysis sits comfortably with other lenses of interpretation.